


Looking Down

by ggrantaire



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Gen, M/M, Mermaids, it's not Disney but it's also not Hans Christian Andersen, what is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 01:53:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7738900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ggrantaire/pseuds/ggrantaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, there lived a family in a castle by the sea.<br/>The sea was full of secrets, only one of which was a boy with pretty hands.<br/>The sea was full of secrets, and perhaps Ronan was always meant to become one of them.</p><p>(Prompt: Fairy Tale AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking Down

**Author's Note:**

> There's a little [pynch week](http://helengansey.tumblr.com/post/147851105595/pynchweek-hello-everyone-its-estrella) happening over on tumblr dot com right now, and anyway one of the first day's prompts was Fairy Tale AU. Hence this ridiculous thing.
> 
> !! Small content warning for (non-graphic) attempted suicide. !!

It’s a sliver of a day when Ronan notices him. Somewhere between running back and forth through the castle all morning while simultaneously dodging his brother, the day had gotten away from him, dwindled down to forgettable seconds. But now he stops. Now he finds himself caught in this singular moment, seconds building into minutes. Now his eyes are caught on _something_. The boundaries of the castle drop away in a jagged cliff, and from his high position, it’s easy to doubt what he’s seen in the water below. Surely there was no one—

But if Ronan’s father had taught him anything, it was that nothing was truly impossible.

For a moment, though, he hesitates, allowing himself to step too close to the edge, ocean spray slowly soaking his clothes. He toes the precipice. The ocean, meters upon plummeting meters below, is an awful collection of tumultuous waves and hidden rocks. Therein no one should be able to hide. And yet…

And so he makes his way down the steep, narrow stairway to the beach below, his curiosity too big to be shoved to the wayside.

There it is again: A blur of human features. A flash of green. A green that doesn’t (shouldn’t) exist in these waters.

Though Ronan has always preferred dry land to the sea, here he feels a terrible clawing in his chest, an inexplicable tug towards the water.

A dock stretches from the shore far into deep waters, and he realizes as he makes his way down it that he never truly realized its length. It feels ages long. And when the end does come, he drops to a crouch, eyes narrowed over the choppy water. Not far off, a wave crashes into a rock which juts particularly sharply from the water.

There is something here.

 _You have to believe things exist, Ronan_ , his father had told him once, years ago. _How will the incredible happen if you don’t believe in it_?

But the ocean doesn’t want to give up its secrets. And certainly, Ronan has never offered any of his in exchange.

The water churns. The sun slips. Long minutes fade back into heartbeats, and the day begins to patter forward once again, dutifully moving along.

Today is not the day for the revelation of secrets.

Something stirs as he turns to go, but he doesn’t look back.

Not today.

 

* * *

 

 _Tonight_.

There’s a fire at Ronan’s heels, a fire in his chest, and it’s tearing him apart with a ferocity that doesn’t care where he throws himself. It burns a hole that doesn’t fizzle out with alcohol, a hole that feels like a permanent gouge. _Irreparable_. That’s the word that gets stuck in his head like a melody.

 _Irreparable_.

And so he runs. He runs so that no one will have to look at him, so that no one will have to whisper, _What do we do with him now_? as though his tendency towards self-destruction, self-medication, and the cycle of it all were a common cold.

Sometimes, everything just hurts.

Sometimes, Ronan doesn’t know how to deal with it.

And so he runs, because the castle doesn’t help, because Declan will only tell him to be quiet, because the expanse of the ocean is calling him in a way it’s never done before. Because he’s always had a flair for the dramatic.

Because it _hurts_.

Maybe they’ll never find him.

It’s a thought that is comforting for the sheer awfulness of it.

And when he takes the stride to hurl himself over the edge of the cliff, it feels like the right answer. Because if anything would choke the burning from his chest, it was the water. The relentless water, the constant water which batters the cliffs day-in and day-out and certainly wouldn’t stop now. It’s rash, ill thought out. Reckless.

It isn’t that Ronan wants to die. It is just that the world had been threatening to pull him apart, and there isn’t enough left of him to hold himself together.

So he throws himself into the sea that night—a silent display of something he didn’t know how to communicate.

The water is horribly cold, cold enough that the sting that came with striking the water is quickly numbed. Cold enough that he’s not only losing the feeling in his limbs but the motion of them, too. There’s ice in his veins, ice down his throat.

When he’d jumped, he hadn’t been sure that he wanted to die.

Now he is.

The waves are predictably merciless: Fists looking to destroy, with all the power of a canon-strike.

And it’s _cold_.

Water washes over his head, seeps into his lungs.

This is it—

In the blackness of the water, something stirs.

 _Impossible_.

A flicker of green. A flash of eyes.

But no—Ronan shakes his head. It was only seaweed.

He closes his own eyes, lets himself sink. His lungs scream in protest.

 _Your father’s dead and so are you_ , he thinks. It feels an awful lot like falling, more so than even the journey through the air. His heart is an anchor he no longer has the strength to real in.

The next thing he is aware of is a pair of hands, a pair of hands that should not exist here, not now, not on either side of Ronan’s face. If his strength were not all but gone, he would open his eyes. Instead he lets the feel of fingertips pressed to his skin burn into his memory—they are the only spots of warmth left on him. Thumbs are pressed to his jawline, tight enough that they could be worrying holes in his skin.

He hears an awful noise, somehow breaking the water. It isn’t a voice, and it isn’t a song, but somehow it is both—a terrible cry without a body.

Ronan longs to open his eyes. Everything is slipping from him. Even the hands, the grip is fading.

And suddenly he realizes that there’s no way that is even real in the first place.

Perhaps he is already dead.

Maybe, he thinks, they’ll never find him.

 

* * *

 

Warmth is the first thing he registers. Light beyond his closed eyelids is the second. With a sick feeling in his chest, the third thing he notices is that there’s a sensation at his feet that feels an awful lot like waves lapping back and forth against them. The first two things might have existed if he’d been dead, but certainly there is no beach with water this cold in heaven.

Ronan opens his eyes.

Every emotion is a distant thing. There are many things he thinks he _ought_ to feel just now, looking at this expanse of sand and water, knowing that he’d tried to be rid of it and failed somehow, feeling the weight of all those memories, all that knowledge that had driven him to it in the first place. He thinks maybe he should feel angry. Or thankful. Perhaps he should feel guilty. But instead, all of these things are very far away from him, not so much emotions as thoughts. Memories of emotions.

The beach is a factual thing. Just another landmark of all the dumb shit Ronan had ever done.

What is less factual is the movement from the water.

He’s lying in the sand beneath the dock, and suddenly it seems like such a purposeful thing. Of all the places he could wash up—

The fingers pressed to his skin—

Though his body is weak with the memory of drowning, he pushes himself up and then clamors onto the surface of the dock.

 _There are very few things that are impossible in this world, Ronan_ , his father had told him.

Very few, indeed, and certainly not—

In the water at the end of the dock is a boy. A boy who, though he does exist in this world, probably _shouldn’t_. His face is angled in a delicate way, almost an accidental sharpness. Freckles ghost along the bridge of his nose. He cocks his head to the side, a small motion with a small question.

It doesn’t escape Ronan’s attention that he is easy to look at.

Ronan wants to describe the blue of his eyes as being that of the ocean, but it’s more because of proximity than the actual accuracy of it. Has he ever seen water that color? However, it seems wrong that a boy who lives underwater could have eyes that so precisely mirror a cloudless sky.

Ronan parts his lips but says nothing, offering a wordless question of his own.

With delay, Ronan notices that he’s smiling, which seems like a gross oversight because what a _nice_ smile it is—cautious, hopeful. Almost a little uncertain.

And then: gone.

Ronan stumbles back, the suddenness of the departure surprising him. One second there, the next, ducked beneath the surface and vanished.

 

* * *

 

He isn’t truly _gone_ though. Not really. Because Ronan still sees him, still catches glimpses of him. He’s good at hiding, but Ronan is good at catching him.

In some sense, Ronan knows that he saved his life. He doesn’t think these words exactly, but he knows it in the way he remembers that night: The cold threatening to suffocate him, the insurmountable weight of his body. His fingers curled at the base of Ronan’s skull. The odd noise that Ronan was sure came from the elegant boy’s lips.

This sound is one Ronan notices, as well. From land, it sounds more like song, caught between the crashing of waves and screeching of gulls.

Oftentimes Ronan finds himself crouched in the sand just looking, listening. And, more remotely, longing.

Weeks pass like this. Days fueled by anticipation, nights dissolving in disappointment when he would fail to appear.

It all feels very much like a dream.

Tonight, even more so.

Matthew is chattering beside Ronan, words spilling out like an endless stream. It feels wrong that Ronan is so uninterested in what he has to say, wrong that it’s Matthew and not Declan that he’s ignoring. However, it’s _him_ again; Ronan can see him from this window, stories above the water though it is. And this is perhaps what is most curious—he isn’t leaving.

Since the morning after the fall (the jump, he reminds himself), he’d never lingered. He was always a flash in Ronan’s periphery—an unmistakable flash, maybe, but a flash nonetheless. But here he is now, eyes upwards, seemingly trained on this very window.

 _Tonight_.

It’s abrupt the way Ronan excuses himself from his younger brother’s company and downright rude the way he brushes past Declan on the stairs, but his mind is only on this one thing, this one calling that’s too loud to ignore anymore, too loud to let slip by.

The sand is still warm from the heat of the day, but the sun has all but disappeared behind the horizon. Ronan edges along the surf, and when he can’t locate the boy, a surge of something takes hold of him, a pain striking for its similarity to the fire of the night before.

He couldn’t just leave, not tonight.

Ronan sloshes out of the water, taking to the dock because that seems to be the favored place.

As far as he can see, the water is empty, containing nothing but rocks and weeds.

There’s that fire again, completely improbably for how soaked the bottoms of his pants are.

How could he lure him out here and then not bother to show his face?

Instead of turning to leave, however, Ronan drops to the edge of the dock.

There’s a dozen things Ronan wants to shout, just in case he’s listening, but what he goes with is, “Who are you?”

Even as it leaves his lips, it feels like the wrong question; the wrong question-word, at least.

Then, as though summoned, there he is, peeking out of the water like he’d been there all along.

And Ronan just stares.

In the fading light, he looks less like something of this earth. A soft, quiet beauty.

Truth be told, though, more than anything else, he looks sad. A gentle smile is on his lips, but he’s looking at Ronan as though it were difficult for him, as though he had worked very hard to get here, as though he has much to say but no time to say it.

His hands curl around the edge of the dock, looking far too fragile against the rough wood. But Ronan remembers how frantically they had held him, how they must have drug him through the water that night.

Ronan wants to speak, but all he can do is stare, stare, stare.

In the back of his mind, he realizes that anyone could look down here and see them. The thought makes Ronan unduly protective; after all, only he had noticed him so far. He had saved _Ronan_ , not any of them.

He tilts his head ever so slightly, so similar to how he did the first day.

Ronan’s mouth feels dry. He repeats, “Who are you?”

And he doesn’t answer, but when his hand closes around Ronan’s, it feels like part of one. Then he tugs, just a little. It’s his own question.

The answer seems easy enough: Ronan jumps into the water after him.

In an instant, he’s underwater, the boy’s hands grabbing at him like claws. The water is above his head, his eyes burn with the salt. He tries to pry him off but to no avail; his shout is choked out.

Was this how it worked? He saves him once and kills him later?

Ronan doesn’t want to die, not this time.

He’s so busy thrashing and struggling to release his grip that it takes a moment to notice that he is no longer dragging Ronan down, no longer moving. A voice cuts through his consciousness:

“Adam.”

He stills. In the blackness of the water, he hears the voice clear as day. It’s a voice that doesn’t belong, made of odd sounds which make his name sound less like a word and more like a lyric. The boy—Adam?—still has his fingers curled in Ronan’s shirt, but he’s no longer dragging him deeper. He is motionless, harmless after all. Ronan almost feels ashamed for panicking. Adam’s face is a centimeter away, a breath away—

In fact—

Ronan can breathe.

The deep breath he takes seems to amuse Adam. The way Ronan clutches onto Adam’s wrists seems to amuse him even more.

He is very close to Ronan. It’s almost enough to take his ability to breathe back away from him.

“Adam?” he repeats dimly, his own voice also unmuffled by the water. 

Nod. “Ronan.”

This is not a question. But Ronan nods as well.

Ronan says, “You saved me.”

Nod.

“What for?”

This very clearly confuses him. He blinks. “You were dying.”

He looks past Adam to try and find the surface of the water but it’s far, far, far. Far too far. But then Adam’s hands are once again at the base of his neck, careful and sure, and then the panic that had come with this realization dulls as quickly as it had come. Being here is impossible, but more than that, it’s beautiful. It’s something fantastic. Finally, Ronan replies weakly, “I wanted to.”

Now he looks even more confounded (eyebrows pulled together, fingers giving a slight tremble), but he doesn’t say anything. His eyes drop, though, suddenly full something Ronan can't decipher. 

An unexpectedly sharp feeling rises in Ronan—an urge to know about this boy who had looked so sad earlier and yet now gawks at the idea of wanting to die. This boy who breathes underwater and sends chills down Ronan’s spine with the mere graze of his touch. Adam, a mystery of a boy: Not human, but not so different from Ronan, either.

“What are you?” he whispers.

Adam considers.

It seems like a simple question, but in the end, the answer isn’t so easy to decipher; Adam leans over and kisses him.

Truthfully, Ronan himself doesn’t know how he would have answered the question. And so he kisses him back. Because he’s pretty, because he is sad, because he holds Ronan’s life in his hands with a strange sort of magic that seems to belong only to him. It’s easy to let him drag him deeper with his lips on his, with his hands at his neck, his waist, his wrists.

Adam whispers something that Ronan cannot understand. It is possible it is another language. It is possible that it is a song. He whispers it again.

Then Adam is smiling.

It’s the brightest thing Ronan has seen in a long time.

So when Adam pulls him into another kiss—this one is the heavy sort, the sort that stays on your lips long after it’s over, the kind that makes you forget to speak—Ronan feels himself giving in. Ronan feels the water around him, and he doesn’t care.

It seems like he has known Adam for a very long time.

“Come with me?” he asks.

And though Ronan has no idea where he’s going, the question only has one answer.

 _Maybe they’ll never find him_.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [The Mermaid](http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/3488/the_mermaid) by Tennyson.


End file.
